Not doing much in Xi'an

Xi'an is supposedto be the place for history in china with hundreds of tombs and monuments and a fucking massive city wall but we were only there for a few days so we ended up doing very little. This was not aided by the fact that i lost my wallet on the bus when i arrived so most of my time was spent going to police offices and stations and the public security bureau.



Afterfailing to sort out all my shit we settled and played a few games of cards with this South African English guy called James who was onholiday in japan from his tokyo sandwich year. we gave him one of our beers we had left from the train journey the night before. after the cards we went and chilled out the front where we got talking to Leigh another english guy who was on a round the world trip before going into his final year at uni. we were joined by a girl called Sarah who had been teaching in china for 7 month and was chilling out in SE Asia before heading back home to Frisco. James left us a bit later cos he ahd a train to catch, but everyone else kept drinking and we were eventually joined by a few others including an Aussie called ben. Me,Pierre leigh and sarah went for some food with sarah doing all the talking, she is pretty good at manderin, and this resultedin a very tasty and cheap meal. that night we just went to the hostel bar and stayed drinking and playing pool to the wee hours sarah somehow managed to make us agree to be awake the next day for 10 to see the terracotta warriors.



The terracotta warriors are the must see sight around xi'an they are about an hours bus away from the town centre and are the big tourist attraction. because they were only discovered in th e1970s and are in none of the history books they call it the 8th wonder because the '7 wonders of the ancient world' are all out there already. (rap fans may also now understand why the great Jay-Z calls himself '9th wonder') anyway the guidebook says you should see the film about it first if u dont get a tour guide- which we didnt - the film was jokes it was a 360 degree screen that placed u in the middle of battlefields and processions and all in the mean time told u the story of the great emperor - i forget his name - that basically did everything for dynastic china. everything. then we had to see teh pits in reverse order cos they get smaller in normal order. Pit 3 was cool it probably had the most in upclose experience of the soldiers and least busy too. pit tw0 was a bit of a disappointment cosit wasall just covered over. Pit 1 however the first one to be discovered was wicked cos u get to see the true scale, there are like 5000 which is mental. to be honest i wasnt blown away, i mean it would be a lot better if they hadnt of taken all the weapons away etc,but the little things are really inpressive, like the fact that they all have varied facial expressions and how they manageto make the horses look angry. Afterthis we just wwent backto teh hostel and chilled out for the rest of the day with breaks for lunch at a dumpling restaurant and dinner on the muslim street (thats what they call it).

next day i went through the wholepolice station palava again and eventually got directed to another police station where they finally got something done, and i got a loss report formy insurance, only thing is, is that its in manderin. we weregoing to do the walkalong the city walls which are 14km long but we just ended up hiring a tandom bike (romantic not gay) and did the wholecircuit in about half an hour including a snack break. the walls were pretty imporessive but the view wernt.

that night we decided we wanted to have a big one so we asked the hostel workers where do they go clubbing and they pointed us towards salsa club which has nothing to do with salsa but is just a huge club full of chinese people (dancing badly) and westerners on tours (dancing badly) how can i tell that they are on tours? because they are dancing in short sleeved shirts with no creeses and every traveelerknows that u cant have a shirt without a creese your bag if ur travelling. the club although it was teh busiest, biggest and the fullest of clubs we have been to in china the tour groups were putting us on a bit of a downer and no1 was giving us drinks which was especially bad because me and pierre had been bigging it upabout how we have got it at every club we go to. we left teh club at about 2, cotched in maccy Ds for a bit, checked out another club that we saw earlier - empty then went home.

on our last day in xi'an we did pretty much nothing, our train was at 5 in the afternoon so i just cotched about made some albums went half way out of town to try and visit teh PSB about my wallet on but it was closed. yeh we didnt really do much, yet i still find myself writing an essays worth about it, shanghai's post will be epic, trust.

ping pong update: beat pierre 4-2 after coming from 0-2 down.